The Janitors' Closet

Unsustainable recycling

Tucson, our neighbor down the freeway, is having issues with its residential recycling program.  It can no longer sell newspaper and glass it collects from its residents (more fallout from China's discontinuance of accepting most recycled trash), so the prospect is to dump it in the landfill.  Tucson already charges residents for recycling (not an optional program, by the way); they're looking at roughly doubling the fees.  Or cutting the pick-up schedule. The City is losing three-plus million annually on the program.  (I served a few years on the City of Phoenix Environmental Quality Commission, and we involve ourselves in commercial recycling in providing commercial janitorial service, so I am a bit attuned to recycling issues.)

Seems to me the rational for recycling is to save money, by re-using stuff, or to avoid depletion of  scarce resources.  Glass is made from silica, hardly a scarce resource, and paper is mostly made from farmed trees - not majestic centuries-old oaks.  So if it costs more in resources (think energy and manpower for both, bleach and water for recycling paper) than the recycled stuff is worth, it is more sustainable to just dump it.

About the only "benefit" I see, in many cases, to residential trash recycling is that it makes folks feel virtuous - they think they are doing good for the planet, or for posterity.  Perhaps better that efforts be directed toward something meaningful: say, limiting topsoil erosion, or global overfishing, or junk going into the ocean. Or Brazilian rainforest currently being razed to provide farmland for soybeans, to export to China, because our current trade war with same has caused them to stop buying American.  Should we want to recycle something that has great economic value, and benefits the planet, maybe we ought to join the rest of the developed world and recycle nuclear fuel.  More nukes might mean less coal.  And we would not just keep the stuff sitting there.

Wasting TP, are you?

"...more than one-third of Americans are wasting toilet paper in public restrooms", according to a survey reported by our friends at Cleaning & Maintenance Management. Problem is, that's just a report of what folks believed and were willing to admit to.  Doubtless, the real number is higher.

At the same time, "A high majority (87 percent) of the survey respondents believe it is important that businesses use sustainable products in their public restrooms to help prevent product waste".  Go figure.

China has a larger problem.  Folks don't just over-use, they grab it in bunches and take it home.  So China is deploying strategically placed cameras, linked to facial recognition software, to limit people to just several sheets per visit.  Might be interesting to see which came first - cameras and facial recognition to protect toilet paper, or cameras and facial recognition to incarcerate and "re-educate" Uighur Muslims in China's far northwest.

Both programs involve, after all, educating recalcitrant people into a healthier, and more socially compliant, mindset and lifestyle.

A good thing, perhaps, that in providing commercial janitorial service, we don't get into many public restrooms.  I'd be even more irate on the wasting, and the surveillance.

Some one million California residents lack safe drinking water

California, one of the most progressive, richest, and highest taxed states in the nation, is looking at adding a tax to remove pollutants from many residents' drinking water.

From an article in the Sacramento Bee,

Governor "Newsom last month released a state budget that called for a new fee on drinking water to fund drinking water projects. He did not release many details, but the proposal was characterized as similar to a 2017 bill by Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, that would have generated $140 million a year for water projects."

Used to be that government was supposed to address safety issues - police, water, safe streets - first.  Even before bullet trains.

Our prime aim, in providing commercial janitorial service, is to provide a safe and healthy environment for our clients.  Much of the industry cleans for appearance; we do not: we clean for health.

Glad I'm not in California.  Must be hard to make a facility healthy if the tap water is not.

Mold - dead or alive?

We don't see a lot of mold in the Phoenix area where I work in commercial janitorial, as mold likes wet places; most building here have little problem with wet foundation, walls or attic.  But where there is an active moisture source - think a floor drain, a pipe leak in a restroom wall, a blockage in the drain line from the air conditioning unit - we have a problem, just like anyone else.

Some people are allergic to mold, and some molds (thankfully, a minority) are toxic to all people.  So the preferred solution is to fix the leak, and fully remove the mold.  Problem is, if the mold is back inside a wall, you need to demo and replace drywall.  Should it be under flooring, an even larger budget is indicated.

Caught an interesting article by our good friends at Cleaning and Maintenance Management, discussing issues that might not come readily to mind, particularly when one tries to cut cost - and corners - by avoiding demolition, using fogging and other chemicals to deal with the mold.

Some procedures involve "killing" the mold, and letting it set.  Seems a reasonable solution.  But, like any silver lining, there lurks a grey cloud within.  A mold can be deactivated - rendered dormant - but will began growing again with a bit of moisture.  Hard to tell if it is dead, or just dormant.  Further:

"For many years, people have been tested by doctors for allergies, and through the testing process, determined to be allergic to mold. The process is called “prick-testing.” During this process, a mold spore is injected just under the skin and if the patient reacts with a raised bump of a certain size or itching, is the doctor may determine that person is sensitive to mold and probably has developed, or will develop, mold allergies. The spore is a dead, not viable, mold spore. What that simply means is that people react to mold whether it is dead or alive."

So - best to bite the bullet and remove the mold.

 

LItter - by the numbers

For all the concern about plastic straws, water bottles, and bags, it turns out that our most littered item is - the plastic cigarette filter (cigarette butt) - at least by number of items, as opposed to poundage.

Makes sense.  Other items are big, and kind of noticeable when you toss them.  Food service items - plates, soda cups and straws - tend to go into the trash can at the restaurant; bags (at least the ones I get) are used to pick up after the dog.  Cigarette butts are dropped on the sidewalk, or out of the car window.  They then tend to get washed off onto the field, or down the storm drain, and out to sea.

Doing commercial janitorial service, we're pretty careful about trash disposal, and try to adhere to recycling programs (and provide them when needed to our clients.)  But, we can't do much about butts (as it were) out on the street.

Here's a bit more, from our friends at Cleaning and Maintenance Management.

What to do with the extra drugs?

There's an interesting kerfuffle on disposal of unused medications, from and article by our friends at Cleaning & Maintenance Management.

On the one hand, "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency strongly discourages the pouring or flushing of pharmaceutical drugs into the sewer system and has issued a new rule banning this practice for hazardous waste pharmaceuticals at health care facilities. Makes sense.  There have been many indications that even small doses of medications turning up downstream can impact various critters, and municipal sewage treatment systems are not designed to remove such contaminates.

On the other hand, "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in contrast, has advised individuals to dispose of narcotics and other controlled substances down the drain or toilet in order to prevent animals and children from coming in contact with them."

You can't win.

Perhaps the best solution might be to put the stuff in the red Hazcom trash cans that most health care facilities use, for bodily fluid contaminated material, sharps, and so on.  That trash is picked up by a specialized vendor and taken out to be (generally) incinerated.  Perhaps  a third of our commercial cleaning involves healthcare facilities; they all use the Hazcom containers, and are generally pretty careful about keeping dangerous materials out of the regular trash.

But I could tell stories about a string of dialysis facilities we cleaned years back; we'd often find rather large pools of blood under the dialysis chairs, and used sharps (needles) siting on the counter, point outward.  They wound up with a "major reorganization" involving liability from a patient bleeding out during dialysis.  Some clients you don't much mind losing.

None of the above addresses what individuals ought do at home, with unused or outdated medications.  Most folks I know don't have Hazcom receptacles available.  And, for me, I don't much want miscellaneous medications to get to my dogs.

More on ocean clean-up

A quick update on the experimental project to remove floating plastic from the "garbage patch" in the Central Pacific.  The huge barrier is capturing plastic, as planned, but losing the plastic almost as quickly.  Best guess is that the barrier (propelled by wind and waves) is not moving fast enough to keep the plastic corralled. The fix currently contemplated is to enlarge it a bit, to allow for more surface area to be hit by wind and waves.  We shall see.

Again, as in commercial janitorial - it's a whole lot easier to deal with garbage, or dust, or tracked in debris when it's concentrated, or when it's produced, than when it's spread over a larger environment.  Be nice if we learned that.

There is money to be made in recycling

Arizona and California investigators have made arrests in a $16 million recycling fraud scheme. 

It seems that an Arizona trucking operation, apparently created just for this one operation (but a pretty big one), has for the last several years hauled a good many tons of used beverage containers from Arizona to California, to take advantage of a California program to, in essence, refund deposits on recyclable containers.  From the article, in All About Arizona:

"Consumers pay an additional beverage fee in California that is either five or ten cents, depending on the container’s size. That fee funds the CRV program that pays those who recycle those very containers. Containers from out of state are not included in the program due to the fact that the fee isn’t charged when the beverages are purchased." 

The firm owner, and his driver, are up on felony charges of "recycling fraud" (didn't know there was such a charge) and grand theft, and are facing up to three years, and restitution.

Many years ago, when I was in college (I shan't tell you just how many years ago) a friend from Massachusetts, attending Arizona State University, drove back here after semester break with his back seat full of soda bottles.  Seems the refundable deposit was two cents in Massachusetts, but five cents in Arizona.  Same offense, on a rather different scale.

Part of the service we offer in providing commercial janitorial service in the metro Phoenix area includes various aspects of recycling. Partly to share my tiny bit of experience from the user's standpoint, and partly to learn a bit more on the subject myself, I served a half dozen years on Phoenix's Environmental Quality Commission; the nearby picture is a few of us from the Commission touring the North Phoenix recycling facility.  But prior to this article, I had no idea just how much money could be made in recycling.

I trust the statute of limitations has expired on my friend's offense.  After all, it's been many years.

Netting space junk

A (relatively) low-tech approach to removing space trash is covered in an interesting article in The Verge.

There is a whole lot of junk (debris from broken satellites, boosters and so on) orbiting around above our atmosphere.  The more that accumulates, the more danger the stuff poses to various satellites and manned missions; even a small particle hitting you at high speed can pack quite a punch, and destroy an expensive piece of equipment.

The British satellite uses a big net to capture a given piece of debris; the current experiment is just to see if a net works.  Once you've netted the thing, the idea is, you can then use a variety of means to slow it down so that it falls out of orbit, and burns up in the atmosphere (with luck, instead of hitting someone on the head).

Seems to me that the basic issue (if the net, or another technology, works) is akin to the experimenting going on to clean junk out of our oceans: there is a lot of junk, spread over a lot of area.  Much expense involved to do the job.

Much easier to catch the stuff where it originates, or not spew it into the environment (ocean or space) in the first place.  It's a bit similar to why we push our commercial janitorial clients to rent treated walk-off mats for their building entrances:  the mats stop the soil from being tracked in, so you have soil to remove from a dozen or two square feet of mat, and not 20,000 square feet of carpet or tile.

The mat is cheaper than my janitor.

Plastic bags - good, bad and compostable

Some time back, a customer asked us about using compostable plastic trash liners at their facility.  As we feature a health and environment friendly commercial cleaning program - careful chemical selection and use, indoor air quality Improvement technology, recycling programs - our client base tends to be aware of environmental concerns.

Compostable trash bags are available, and they work.  Problem is, for them to work, they have eventually to be composted.  Landfills in the Phoenix area do not try to compost; the climate is a bit too dry.  So there is no upside, environmental or otherwise, to the liners.  Further, they tend to weaken if too long exposed to heat, as in a supplier's non air conditioned warehouse (again, it gets hot in Phoenix).

Got to thinking about the above in reading an article in All About Arizona News about grocer Kroger's decision to phase out plastic shopping bags.  The bags are recyclable, but need to be gathered together and run in bulk; thrown in with ordinary recycle trash, they gum up the machinery.  Hard to organize in the real world.

Further, alternatives for plastic bags present little upside.  Paper bags take more energy to produce, though the trees cut to provide the paper are not old growth Sequoias, but farmed trees - little different in ecological impact than planting and harvesting corn.  The reusable tote bags that many tout (and tote) tend to not be washed often enough, and become breeding grounds for various pathogens from the last few visits to the grocer.  Drug and hospital bills from those pathogens will be significant, and ought be worked into the figures.

Finally, I need the plastic bags from grocer and newspaper for picking up after my dogs.  Phoenix (and most cities) forbid un-bagged poop in trash cans, or left on folks' lawns (go figure).

So, I'd have to buy and use plastic bags anyway.  If I shopped at Kroger.  Which I don't.